Languages in motion: Multilingualism and mobility in the linguistic landscape

Abstract

This special issue of the International Journal of Bilingualism is concerned with the interplay of multilingualism and mobility in the linguistic landscape (henceforth LL). The various contributors to this special issue view LL studies as offering a way of investigating multilingualism and mobil- ity. The LL is understood herein as an expression of multilingualism in society, a site where lan- guage, together with other semiotic resources, is involved in the symbolic construction of multilingual spaces. The LL is a crucial site in which the mobility of language resources can be mapped. This dual attention to multilingualism and mobility is motivated by recent theorising in sociolinguistics, as well as our collective interest in the ever-expanding discipline of LL studies. The aim is to bring together research that addresses complex theoretical and methodological issues within the emerging paradigm of the sociolinguistics of globalisation (Coupland, 2010; Heller, 2007; Pennycook, 2010) in which mobility plays a crucial role in the study of multilingualism (Blommaert, 2010). By investigating language practices in the LL, our focus is specifically on language in motion, a process by which different linguistic resources are in a state of translocality, meaning they are on the move across various trajectories of time and space (cf. Blommaert, 2010; Johnstone, 2010). Such a focus allows us to begin to examine what the consequences for languages may be through these processes of mobility enabled by globalisation. Specifically, we seek to investigate how these processes manifest themselves in the LL. We take an approach to LL research proposed by Stroud and Mpendukana (2009), where the LL embodies the social distribution of multilingual resources that in turn have consequences for language ideologies, discourses and practices. Throughout each of the articles we seek to trace the trajectories of mobile linguistic resources and analyse the consequences of these flows for language ideologies.Recently, there have been calls for a more contextualised, historical and critical approach that can produce a 'greater understanding of the larger socio-political meanings of linguistic land- scapes' (Leeman & Modan, 2009, p. 332). Indeed, the LL of a given community has become an influential site of contestation and negotiation, appropriation and resistance of multilingualism. The LL provides important clues to the nature of multilingualism in the community and often pro- vides a more accurate account of the lived sociolinguistic reality of a given community than offi- cial language policies do. By viewing the LL in this way we see it as an important site for the investigation of how the processes of mobility are impacting on the linguistic hierarchy of given places and spaces. From this perspective, the current volume will investigate the discourse of mul- tilingualism across four research sites located in Ireland, Finnish Lapland, Ethiopia and the United States. More specifically, our goal within this special issue is to examine what linguistic resources get (re) mobilised and the potential consequences of such mobility. With this in mind, each of the articles is orientated around the following set of questions:1. What linguistic resources get mobilised and for what purposes?2. What is the indexical value of these language resources?3. How do varying language communities use the LL in different ways to address the issues of global flows and mobility?4. In what way do the processes of language mobility stir language hierarchies and values attached to the language resources evident in these spaces?5. What are the consequences for language ideologies?Key to such an investigation is an understanding of language as a mobile resource, in line with Heller (2007, p. 2) who argues: '(...) language as a set of resources which circulate in unequal ways in social networks and discursive spaces and whose meaning and value are socially con- structed within the constraints of social organisational processes, under specific historical condi- tions'. …